They Don't Need Your "Expertise" Anymore

They need the part of you AI cannot touch. Here is how to lead with it.

Back in 1983, Price Waterhouse made me an on-the-spot offer for a lateral move from another CPA firm. I was hired as what they called “Senior” back then. This was a Friday, and the head of HR asked me if there was something in particular that I wanted to focus on for audit work.

I told him one thing: “do not put me on a bank. I am a chartered accountant from India, good with inventory and analysis in manufacturing companies and, more recently, not-for-profit. I know nothing about banking”.

On Monday morning they sent me to Morgan Guaranty Trust - now JP Morgan Chase - at 55 Wall Street. Ha! So much for answering the question honestly!

I was staffed on a unique project which was to evaluate credit risk on behalf of regulators on how loans were made by the bank, and how each of the loans that were made to companies or countries were to be independently categorized by Pricewaterhouse.

I had no expertise for that work. What I had was a working brain and no fear of asking a question that might get me thrown out of people’s offices. So I asked. And I got thrown out of people’s offices. I read everything I could find on how a bank decides to lend to a “whole country.” Within a year, I was sitting with the bank’s chief economist and senior loan officers, and at times across from heads of state, running country risk. A partner once told me to leave his office because I knew nothing about his business. My answer stuck with me. “Of course I do not know your business. I know mine.”

I built a career on that. On being the one who could think clearly when the answer was not obvious yet, whether or not I was the expert.

I am telling you this because a version of that conversation is happening to your best people right now, and they are terrified of this AI tsunami.

A leadership coach wrote something this week that landed hard. Working on an AI rollout, she finally got someone to say the thing out loud. “If I become really good at this, will they still need me?” Almost a third of employees admit they are dragging their feet on AI. It is rarely about the tool. The tool does the thing they built their whole identity on, and if the machine does what you do, the floor drops out of who you are.

Your senior people feel this more than anyone, and few of them say it out loud in a meeting, as in the example above. They spent twenty years becoming the person with the deepest technical answer. That was the identity and the edge. And it is the exact thing being commoditized to zero.

Here is the reframe, and it is not a soft one. Clients trusted you because of your judgment. The “expertise” was the evidence that your judgment was worth trusting. AI can produce the expertise now. It cannot sit across from a client and own the moment you tell them the hard truth their own team keeps avoiding. That was always the real job. The technical depth was how you earned the right to do it.

So here is a move you can make this week, and it costs nothing.

Before your next client meeting, write down one thing about their business that has nothing to do with your project. A pressure in their market. A bet their CEO made last quarter. Open the meeting with it and ask a real question about it. Then watch the temperature of the conversation change. That is the exchange AI cannot have, the one where you think alongside them about where their business is heading, and it is the one that decides next year’s budget.

Do that ten times and something shifts in how you see yourself. You stop being the person who knows the most and start being the person they call when the answer is not clear yet. That person is hard to replace, and first in line for the bigger mandate.

If you want to make that shift on purpose, and faster than flailing at it alone, that is the work I do with senior leaders. Set up a call with me.

Raju Panjwani
Founder of Live Masterminds. Former Managing Director at Morgan Stanley. I work with senior leaders in IT services and technology consulting, on becoming the leader the business now needs.